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The Seven/Ten consortium have matched the Nine/Foxtel bid for the AFL, unfortunately this makes things slightly unclear as to who will win the rights. Seven/Ten have first and last bid rights, but a match isn’t an outbid, so who knows?

Ultimately I would prefer to have the AFL on Seven/Ten. Firstly, Seven/Ten do a better job of it in my view, plus Nine are already tied up with NRL and can’t really put both on live on Friday night.

Seven & Ten also have the better commentators in my view, hopefully Bruce McAvaney will take up the commentators position again. He is in my view, the best AFL commentator of the current era. He has done well hosting things for Seven, hopefully they can persuade him into the seat behind the microphone…or he might just jump in…

Putting that to one side, Nine (excluding Dennis Commetti Ex-Seven) and Foxtel have some of the most boring and pointless AFL commentators the game has ever seen, and don’t get me started on Collingwood president Eddie McGuire commentating on Collingwood matches for Nine.

Bring back good AFL Coverage, give the rights to Seven & Ten!

Samuel

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Word is circulating that 2UE management have asked John Kerr in for a meeting on Wednesday January 18. As yet it is unclear what this meeting is going to be about, but with the sheer amount of complaints 2UE have been receiving over their move of John to weekends, it wouldn’t surprise me, or others, if they are going to discuss reversing the decision.

On that note, it isn’t too late to help, sign the petition, ring 2UE on (02) 9954 9930, or write a letter to:

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Looking at some of the news in the IT world at the moment, there is certainly a lot happening.

Starting with the Microsoft WMF (Windows Metafile) bug, which is undoubtedly the worst bug Microsoft have had for quite a while. Basically, a WMF file is a vector image script, which defines lines and shapes, effectively allowing it to be scaled to any size without distortion. Unfortunately when Microsoft designed the WMF specification, they included an error handler so that a faulty WMF image could still do something, however this allows people to write bad WMF files with an error handler containing malicious code. Even worse is that it is virtually undetectable, as a WMF files doesn’t have to have a .wmf extension and can be opened simply by being an image of a webpage, in an email, a document of some description or any number of other ways.

It gets worse, within 24 hours of the exploit being discovered, there were active exploits, dropping all sorts of nasties on Windows based computers everywhere, and Microsoft still don’t have a patch, despite the fact that it is now well over a week since the exploit was found. Thankfully an independent security expert has written a temporary patch, which Microsoft and many security agencies are recommending that you install.

Apart from that, it is common sense security which will also help. The usual don’t open unknown attachments, don’t follow suspect links, and something that a lot of people don’t do but should, turn off the preview pane in your email client, otherwise your emails open simply by being selected, which can happen very easily, and very accidentally.

Other interesting and good IT News includes:
Wisconsin requires voting software to be open source and print a paper confirmation so that anybody who wants to can verify the software does what it should do.

The French military police ditch Internet Explorer and Outlook in favour of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, citing standards compliance and the fact that they want everybody to be able to read their public information, not just Microsoft users.

Massachusetts confirms that they are adopting the Open Document Format (ODF), currently found in Open Office, and ditching Microsoft’s proprietary office format, citing, again, open standards compliance, enabling anyone to read and write the data regardless of operating system or office software (once Microsoft play ball and accept ODF in MS Office, it’s Microsoft’s loss if they don’t!).

An interesting day or so in IT, and not Microsoft’s finest!

Samuel

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Once again it is time for the monthly blog view stats, of which most can be found here.

Starting with the traffic summary, it is interesting to note that there was a severe drop in the number of readers over the Christmas & Boxing Day public holidays. The number of visitors is down from 4,160 in November to 3,743 in December. The number of page views is down from 20,000+ in November to 14,499 in December.

The searches which brought people here were rather varied, the list is topped by various searches for Schnappi and variations of my name. There were plenty of searches for information relating to John Kerr, George Gibson, Glenn Wheeler and various other radio personalities, someone wanting to know how good 20,000 page views is, a very strange search for “serial number do sam broadcast”, someone looking for their “stolen bicycle transmitter”, somebody who just had to know about “potential competitiors of nappies”, somebody wanted to cheat on a job application with a “citadel back office programmer resume”, and lots lots more.

Internet Explorer won the month with 61.24% of page views, followed by Mozilla Firefox with 28.22% and Apple Safari with 3.01%, and others.

Windows also topped the month with 93.41%, followed by Macintosh with 5.52% and Linux with 1.04%, and others.

The majority of readers were from Australia, 84.72% to be exact, followed by the US with 5.52% and the UK with 4.91%, and others.